the International Committee to Save the Meos, as describing the treatment of the Hmong by the Laotian regime and its Vietnamese overseers as "so brutal, so systematic, that it can only be characterized as genocide." Rather than move to the lowlands many Hmong chose to make the long trek to Thailand. Once the refugees were in Thailand, which they entered after crossing the Mekong River-doing so, according to dispatches, by clinging to bundles of bamboo tied to- gether wi th reeds ( hardly any of these hill people knew how to swim )-they settled in Thai refugee camps near the border, and the stories of chemical attacks, with weap- ons variousl y described as rockets and bombs launched from Laotian and Vietnamese aircraft, began to filter out. One of the most comprehensive of these reports-appearing in the Balti- more Sun on August 13, 1979-was written by the correspondent Stanley Karnow, who had visited Loei, the site of one of the Thai camps. Karnow wrote that the Communists who con- trolled Laos had been "exterminating the Meos out of revenge for their service to the United States," and went on to say that "the most shocking aspect of this drive against the Meo . . . is the accumulation of evidence indicat- ing that the Communists have been using poison gas against them." He cited the recollections of, among oth- ers, a young veteran of the C.I.A.- backed Hmong army, who said that one day early in 1978 two jet aircraft had flown at an altitude of about a thousand feet over the village of N am Phun, where the young man was at the time, and had sprayed a cloud of what he described as "yellow rain" over the village; a couple of days later, some twenty people in the village died after severe attacks of diarrhea and vomit- ing, and about a hundred other villag- ers, including the young man himself, fell sick. Toward the end of his dis- patch, Karnow, who in the process of reporting had apparently discussed the poison-gas issue with American diplo- mats in Thailand, wrote that the refu- gee accounts were "reinforced by evi- dence that the Communists have four chemical warfare depots" in Laos. He further noted that "the chemicals pre- sumably have been provided by the Soviet Union, which helps the Laotian regime to maintain its air force of about 20 MIG-21s, also furnished by Mos- cow," but he emphasized the fact that there was no evidence that such planes had been flown by Soviet pilots. "It may be . . . that an investigation on the ground in Laos by the Red Cross or Amnesty International could uncover firmer proof-or, perhaps, reveal the Meo accounts and the other evidence to be illusory," he added. The mention in Karnow's report of "yellow rain" appears to be the first use in the American press of those two words to characterize what might have befallen Hmong tribes- men in Laos. Before long, the same words were to achieve extraordinary noto- riety in the United States and become, over the following decade, the center of a bitter controversy that cast a persistent shadow over arms-control negotiations between the two great powers. The Carter Administration had told the Laotian government of its concern over the reported use of poison gas against the Hmong nearly a year before Karnow filed his dispatch, and toward the end of 1978 the State Department instructed its missions in Southeast Asia to seek further information about the possible use of poison gas in Laos. Early in 1979, the Administration again expressed its concern to the Lao- tian authorities, both in Vientiane and in the Laotian Embassy in Washing- ton; it also raised the poison-gas issue with the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. That May, the State Department sent two representa- tives to refugee camps in Thailand to interview any Hmong who claimed to have eyewitness knowledge of poison- gas attacks, and in September the Pen- tagon dispatched an Army medical team to Thailand for the same purpose. The State Department representatives completed their report in June; it was based on twenty-two interviews with Hmong who claimed to be either vic- tims or eyewitnesses of chemical at- tacks, and it concluded that there was reason to believe that some sort of chemical agent was being employed against the Hmong in Laos. The findings of the Army's medical team, based on thirty-eight interviews with Hmong, were made public in De- cember, in the course of hearings held by a House Foreign Affairs sub com- 47 . U , SUN VALLEY WHAT CAN YOU DO AT A SKI RESORT IN THE SUMMER? 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